Photo by Tracy Penoyer
Teddy Wayne is the author of the new novel The Au Pair. His other books include The Winner. He lives in Brooklyn.
Q: You’ve said The Au Pair was initially inspired by the movie Anatomy of a Fall. Can you say more about that, and about how you created your character Steven?
A: Without giving too much away, I was very taken by the central and unresolved ambiguity of that movie and was interested in writing something in that vein—but not to make the main character the one whose criminal innocence or guilt we judge. Instead, we end up judging Steven’s innocence or guilt in a very different respect.
Q: The writer Ayad Akhtar said of the book, “Teddy Wayne has written a book about selling out that doesn’t—a guilty pleasure that earns its guilt. The Au Pair is a canny seduction wrapped in a page-turning thriller wrapped in an elegy for the literary novel: a threefold delight.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s what I was aiming for: a literary thriller that straddles and interrogates both sides of that genre and turns into a statement on what contemporary literature now means to the culture.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Steven and his wife, Lucy?
A: With Steven and Lucy, I was primarily interested in exploring what’s become increasingly common in the U.S., a household in which the wife drastically outearns the husband, and the ramifications that might have for a less than perfect marriage.
I was also thinking about the “market economics” of status-conscious marriages; Steven found Lucy when his “stock was likely at its all-time high,” but it declined over the years while hers went even higher.
Q: As a novelist and a screenwriter, how do the two interact for you?
A: For both The Au Pair and my previous novel, The Winner, I wrote the first several drafts of the novels first before beginning work on the screenplays. Then, as I wrote the screenplays, I revised the novels further, and found in both cases that changes in one medium would work their way into the other.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A novel about a professional athlete.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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